He let out a long, drawn out sigh as he stared at his laptop’s keyboard. His hands laid on top, unmoving, but almost twitching with nervous energy.

 He just needed to find a starting point. Something, anything. But, alas, he couldn’t. He went over a plethora of possibilities, but none of them fit quite right. None of them *clicked*. None of them felt like they would flow in the way that they should.

And so, he stared. He stared, stared, stared. Hoping for… What was it that he was hoping for, exactly? He didn’t know. He was hoping for something, he quietly mused, still staring at his unmoving hands, resting on the unmoving keyboard.

 He was hoping for the familiar pitter-patter of his fingers rhythmically pressing keys to start back up, he realized. Hoping for a sudden burst of inspiration. Or motivation. Or… or anything, really. Anything that could make him start writing again.

 But, of course, there was no miraculous drive. No amazing theme suddenly materialized in his head. His hands didn’t start moving of their own accord. Of course they didn’t. They remained unmoving, and a sense of guilt of all things, started to rise up inside him as he watched them.

 He felt guilty, because he just continued to stare, just continued to hope, instead of just… making them move. He wondered why he didn’t, for only the briefest of moments, before he remembered that he simply couldn’t. Not anymore. Not for a while now.

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 It really used to be that easy for him. He just had to sit down, and make his hands dance across his keyboard, and before he knew it, he would’ve written up something satisfactory. Now, he just stared. He didn’t know what had changed. He only knew that, recently, things started being different. He felt stuck. He felt like he was wading through mud, or quicksand, or… something similarly obstructive! His thoughts didn’t flow like they used to. His mind felt like a dried up riverbed. The foundations were still there, but.. something critical was missing, and he simply didn’t know how to bring it back.

 So he just continued to stare. More through his hands, and his keyboard, and everything else in his field of view than at these things. His eyes were glazed over, unfocused, like whatever was behind them wasn’t truly there. He had sunken deep into his own mind, but all he was met with was an… uncertain emptiness. An absence of real thought. Sure, there were thoughts drifting past, but none of them felt like they were his. They were all just fillers, trying to mask the absence of anything with substance. Like people talking about the weather to obscure the fact that they’d run out of actual topics. White noise, in a way. Something to keep the silence away. A meager attempt that quickly unraveled and fell apart at the seams at closer inspection. And inspect closely he did, growing more and more… desperate, as the complete and utter lack of the spark he once held made itself clear under his scrutiny.

 His eyes refocused, the image of his hands, frozen as they were, once again catching his attention. At this point, he might as well try to write about that, he mused. Write about their lack of movement, about the absence of the rhythmic pitter-patter, the guilt, the inability to find his spark, about… all of this.

 He cleared his throat, and, with surprising ease, willed his hands to move, setting to work.

 “I let out a long, drawn out sigh as I stared at my laptop’s keyboard,” he began...